Consolidating Compensation Strategy

One Unified Global Compensation Strategy

The Evolution of a Compensation Strategy

Case Study: One Strategy and a Singular Best Practice

Company overview and background

A leader in engineering products for use in critical applications by industries worldwide. Employing approximately 5,000 people across six global divisions. Influenced but not controlled by corporate suggestions for merit, STI and LTI elements,
compensation strategy and execution had been largely left to each individual division's discretion. Each division independently defined and executed their compensation strategies, implementation and operations using their own, internally developed
spreadsheets and practices. The process was manually intensive and made overall reporting, analysis and alignment of corporate goals with employee compensation virtually impossible to achieve, and significantly complicated cross divisional employee mobility.

The Challenges to be met

Late in 2013 the Global Head of Compensation was charged with the mission of unifying their compensation into a single strategy and best practice. His immediate task was to take inventory of the overall situation, similarities and differences across all six divisions and determine the most impactful and plausible near term changes.

His findings included:

disparate and often duplicated data sources such as salary survey data;

a single annual LTI process supported and driven by corporate while separate STI review and merit planning processes existed at each geographic region within each division. In the US alone this meant that enormous manpower was committed to executing 13 distinct spreadsheet based compensation processes every year.

It was clear that bringing all of these disparate activities together into one system was not going to be trivial, and couldn't be reasonably executed with spreadsheets.

Starting the Journey

Having been involved in the global rollout of eeStrategy's offerings in a prior role with a global construction company, and after reviewing the breadth of offerings available in the marketplace, it was clear eeStrategy's eeCompensation was the platform uniquely suited to address their near and long term needs.

The primary concern was to ensure eeCompensation would conform to all current plans variations to help drive user acceptance and adoption to forthcoming changes. No detail in any existing plan could be excluded and, although most plans looked similar and were structurally identical, the funding models and the way awards were made within each plan were fundamentally different.

eeCompensation was able to conform to all these nuances and yield an intuitive line manager experience that, coupled with its guidance and recommendations capabilities, supported every existing plan. This eliminated the need for extensive training and hand holding while ensuring recommendations were made within corporate guidelines.

Creating a Global View of Compensation

Within a few months, they were able to bring the entire global LTI review process and the domestic (US) STI review and merit planning processes from four divisions onto eeCompensation. The immediate result:

a 75% reduction in divisional HR labor committed to the planning and execution of the review processes, and

a 20% reduction in review lag times.

With the technology proven, the remaining divisions and international operations units were brought onto the platform giving them a single worldwide view and management of their global compensation practices and are positioned to fully leverage eeCompensation's unique modelling capabilities to refine, advance and reformulate Global compensation strategies and initiatives to fully align with and achieve their global business objectives.

It took me minutes to accomplish with eeCompensation what has previously taken hours with spreadsheets. - CFO